On the hideous spectacle of the pair spending their evenings in shorthand schools and polytechnic classes, learning bookkeeping and typewriting with incipient junior clerks, male and female, from the elementary schools, let me not dwell. There were even classes at the London School of Economics, and a humble personal appeal to the director of that institution to recommend a course bearing on the flower business. He, being a humourist, explained to them the method of the celebrated Dickensian essay on Chinese Metaphysics by the gentleman who read an article on China and an article on Metaphysics and combined the information.

George Bernard Shaw, Pygmalion

For Dionysius of Halicarnassus, an important part of the historian's task is the gathering and analysis of material. The present article is concerned with one particular aspect of this, namely, the investigation of chronology. It has two aims: first, to defend the accuracy of Dionysius' chronological system against the sometimes unfair criticisms of modern scholars; second, to assess how, in his perception, the role of chronographical research related to a historical work on a noncontemporary subject.

The research qualities Dionysius singled out for praise in the writings of Theopompus – a historian he much admired – were care, effort, preparation, and autoptic investigation. Not all of these were applicable to a historian who chose a non-contemporary theme. However, within the limits determined by his subject – Rome's origins and history to 264 B.C. – Dionysius similarly attempted preparatory work and investigation of data for his history.

The word cursus may seem to be keeping strange company with slaves and freedmen. It does not refer here to the cursus publicus, but to the system of promotion in the sub-equestrian regions of the Imperial administration. Cursus implies movement, advancement, promotion. No bureaucracy can function efficiently without order and opportunity in its lower as well as its higher ranks. If a cursus did not exist it would have been necessary to invent one. It is necessary to affirm this of the lower ranks of the Roman bureaucracy in the early empire precisely because it has so often been denied or ignored. The impression gained from reading many works on the Imperial administration is that of fervid equestrian movement from post to post and province to province at the top, with a static substratum of Imperial slaves and freedmen providing stability and continuity below. Such an account is to some extent true. But that it is not true enough is largely the fault of the evidence.

For archaeologists discussion of style is unavoidable. Within classical archaeology ‘style’ is closely associated with connoisseurship as practised by J. D. Beazley. Style identifies individuals, artistic personalities such as the Amasis Painter. This notion of style necessarily overlaps with another debate within both anthropology and prehistoric archaeology (personhood) which also touches on an older discussion within classical studies. These two debates have remained strangers to each other. The article explores these issues in relation to the iconography of hares and arming scenes. Notions of personhood and agency force us to re-evaluate such iconography and its effectiveness as narrative.

Scholars disagree over why Plato's Clitophon ends without any response to Clitophon's criticisms of Socratic method. A close examination of the characterisation of Clitophon provides a potential answer. During the course of his speech, Clitophon shows himself to have misunderstood Socrates, in terms both of method and teaching. The manner in which he reports Socratic conversations suggests that he is more interested in Socrates' personal authority than in entering into productive dialogue. Clitophon represents the kind of young man who wants Socrates to tell him what to think and who will go elsewhere if Socrates will not answer this desire. Socrates remains silent in the face of Clitophon's criticisms because Clitophon has offered no thoughts of his own and, this being the case, there is no possibility of making elenctic progress.

While the Latin technical writers have been, and continue to be, studied by historians of the relevant discipline, scant attention has been devoted by linguists to their technical language. If they have interested philologists and linguists at all, then until recently it was as writers of popular, or ‘vulgar’, Latin, rather than of ‘technical’ Latin. This neglect of Latin technical languages as varieties in their own right reflects a wider reluctance to take technical languages into account in other areas of linguistics. There is a substantial literature devoted to technical languages in isolation, especially to the practical problems of communication in technical contexts, of teaching, translating and standardising technical languages, but coherent treatment of technical words and technical languages in the context of the lexicon or the language as a whole is almost entirely lacking in the standard works on word-formation and semantics.

The plays of Aeschylus contain many contradictions, and much recent criticism of the dramatic technique of this author has been directed at attempts to extract from these contradictions a unified picture of what the poet really intended us to understand in the case of each particular play. Within the last few years no less than four major articles have been devoted to giving a logically consistent interpretation of the Seven, and if one extends the range to, say, the last thirty years, one can find that all the plays of Aeschylus have been subjected to criticism of a similar kind.

All this may seem entirely praiseworthy; and yet, as we come to read more and more of these books and articles, the sensation may grow upon some of us that we are not so much learning about Aeschylus as witnessing the transactions of a private club: transactions conducted with admirable propriety, but according to a system of rules which has been left unrevised for too long, untouched even after the notorious affair of the Suppliants. Although the members of this club are willing to challenge each others' view-points, they are all agreed that no gentleman would venture to call in question the one great assumption that underlies all their discussions: namely that Aeschylus could not possibly have constructed plays in which such contradictions were deliberately intended; and only seldom can he be allowed to have contradicted himself by oversight.

Propertius 1.3 famously begins with the drunken poet returning from a night out to find his puella Cynthia asleep. The sleeping Cynthia is then apparently idealised by the poet through a series of comparisons with mythological heroines, until she wakes up and shows her true and less elevated character, shrewishly nagging the poet for staying out late with another woman, and thereby destroying his illusions. Some of the wit and irony of the situation has been pointed out in previous accounts of the poem; this treatment takes a closer look at the text, especially at the mythical analogues for Cynthia applied at the beginning of the poem, and argues that part of the wit and amusement of the poem derives from its articulation of the poet's suspicions of Cynthia's infidelity. This is not a tragic or dramatic effect, but rather a clever and amusing comedy; the amusing self-characterisation of the poet as a drunken bumbler racked with lust and suspicion is fully consistent with the kind of elegist envisaged by Paul Veyne, who rightly stresses that Roman love-elegy has much more to do with literary entertainment than with the intense analysis of passion. The scene is being narrated by the poet with retrospective wit and irony against himself; to use the convenient terms employed by Winkler in his book on Apuleius, the poet as auctor (writer of the poem) provides an entertaining view of the poet as actor (character in the poem's story).

On page 318 of F. M. Simpson's History of Architectural Development, vol. 1 (Longmans, 1956) I reprinted as fig. 107 the plan of Trajan's Forum from the earlier edition. I reprint it again here as Fig. 1. The plan is Lanciani's (Forma Urbis Romae, Milan, 1893, IV, 1). Compare R. Lanciani, Ruins and Excavations (London, 1897), fig. 119. This has drawn on me the strictures of scholars. Thus R. Martin writes (Revue des Études anciennes, p. 404, n. 1) that my book commits an ‘erreur dans le plan du forum de Trajan, qui ne rend pas la forme circulaire du côté méridional de la cour reconnu par G. Lugli’. By which he seems to mean that my plan makes the front wall of the court, to each side of the triumphal arch, straight and not segmental. A. von Gerkan, in Gymnasium, 1958, p. 545, remarks that in my book ‘gar zu oft hoffnungslos veraltetes Material vorgelegt wird. Das Trajansforum Abb. 107 ist ein groteskes Beispiel dafür’. Alas! following his usual custom, he gives no evidence for his statements, gladly though I should learn about these things.

The classical periodical literature of the last thirty years or so does not contain much about Virgil's fifth Eclogue, and those scholars who have written on it have mostly been concerned with the mysterious figure of Daphnis and the question of his relationship to Julius Caesar. Two exceptions are Adelaide Hahn, who briefly discussed the first 19 lines to show that the characters of Menalcas and Mopsus are sharply differentiated, and Peter Steinmetz, who, in an article about the Eclogues as dramatic poems, devoted three short paragraphs to Eclogue 5 and argued for the existence of a homosexual element in the exchanges between the two shepherds. Like Hahn and Steinmetz, I shall be concerned with characterisation and dramatic progression. It seems to me that the poem is most interesting if regarded primarily as a mime, with a beginning, a middle and an end, a miniature comedy in which we are expected to read between the lines.

This note is intended as a contribution towards a better understanding of the structure of credit relations in Greek society.

Diogenes Laertios: Life of Menippos 6.99 (Long):

.

This passage has been consistently misunderstood by translators and commentators. Typical of the confusion is the translation by Hicks in the Loeb edition:

Hermippos says that he [Menippos] lent out money by the day and got a nickname from doing so. For he used to make loans on bottomry and take security, thus accumulating a large fortune.